It could be selective enforcement, but the point is there is no reason to assume it is. A NYC landlord is highly motivated not to renew a long-term rent-controlled lease that is, counter to the intent and letter of rent control laws, not held by a primary resident who was the original lessee or legal successor thereof. Doing so could easily be a matter of many tens of thousands of dollars a year (no exaggeration). Most landlords would not need any encouragement to terminate the lease (and start an eviction proceeding) upon discovering ANY case of rent-control fraud â they would not enforce this âselectively.â So why would anyone assume this was done on the instigation of the police or whatever? Just as likely that the landlord saw the guyâs name in the media, read that he was a professor in London, and put two and two together.
I agree and Iâm quite glad it isnât a boring discussion. Like I said, I find these types of discussions extra interesting. The best part for me is how elaborate peopleâs reasoning gets and the depth to which the stories they imagine go to, to back their assumptions whichever way they lean. There in nothing wrong with any of this per se, it is very natural human nature. Isnât it fascinating that you very seldom see a âweâll need more information before we knowâ, or a simple âit isnât likely they conspiredâ, and that it is much more likely to see some very detailed and elaborate theories? Human minds are amazing pattern matching machines.
Anyway, I donât want to take away from the discussion on the topic by talking too much about my personal fascination with how it is being discussed. I do want to thank you for sharing how you had a visceral reaction to the power dynamic and wording then shifted upon reflecting on your relevant life experiences, that is exactly the kind of thing that i wonder as i read these types of threads. Cheers.
I donât see the additional facts as changing my opinion of either Graeber or the landlord, but rather adding additional context.
For example, maybe this is a regional thing but I would never think of describing even a long-term rented apartment as the âfamily homeâ, and you can see that in it the initial comments here others falsely assumed that this meant a house that had been foreclosed on.
home != house
a house is a physical object. A home is not a physical object but a social and emotional construct - a home could be made anywhere including in a cave or the lee of a bridge.
Having rent not go up while living in the same home youâve lived in most of your life, is the very reason why rent control laws exist.
Itâs pretty clear that he wasnât living there. If he was fraudulently using a rent-controlled apartment as a pied-Ă -terre, then, by many peopleâs definition, he was stealing. From the landlord, and in a more nebulous sense from every other renter in NYC who has to pay higher market rates for an apartment.
As for your âfellow bourgeoisieâ let me point out that rent control/stabilization is common in NYC (and was ubiquitous for apartments rented 50 years ago) and, for long-term landlords, it may well have been imposed on a a building that the landlord already owned.
Look, rent control is a highly debatable issue, and most New Yorkers can see both sides, but I think thereâd be general agreement among renters and landlords alike that people shouldnât be allowed to hold on to rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments if they arenât actually living there.
Well hello there, pre-conceived notion. How you doinâ?
Dude, Graeber himself states openly that he is living in London! Canât get much clearer than that.
Living there for 365 days/yr? In every one of the last 10 years? Gosh - did he send you that info in an email or did you, you know, just make it up because it suits your weltanschauung?
No, I didnât make it up, and thereâs no need to get snide about it. I did my research before weighing in.
Here, for example, is his Reddit user overview page (he did an âAMAâ there) in which he clearly states, unambiguously, several times that he is currently living in the UK. He also gives âLondonâ as his location on his Twitter page, and tweets things like âwonât be back to London till the 16th.â Wikipedia describes his residence as âLondonâ and that has never been the subject of edit wars. Many other public resources list him as a professor working in London, which â whlle it doesnât prove that he lives there â is certainly quite consistent with all the other evidence that he lives in London.
â365 days/yrâ and âevery one of the last 10 yearsâ are totally irrelevant here. To avoid losing a rent-controlled apartment in NYC, he would have to establish via a preponderance of evidence that it has been his primary residence, continuously, the whole time, and living in London even for one year (even if he spent a considerable amount of time in New York) would defeat that.
and does a Reddit AMA, a twitter account, and Facebook provide a preponderance of evidence?
Furthermore, is Graebner the only member of his family? Can he not have a partner, siblings, or children who live (for some definition of âliveâ/âlivingâ) in NY?
He could, I guess, although in that case I donât know why he would have tweeted that he was being evicted and not, say, his partner, siblings, or children â seems like that would be an even more egregious case of âadministrative harassment,â if a relative were evicted just because of his or her relationship to Graeber.
I didnât see any evidence of siblings or children and I imagine his partner, whom he mentions on Reddit, lives with him in the U.K., but who knows. Iâm not interested enough in the issue to do any more research 
I believe the most likely explanation is that this was a simple and unobjectionable case of someone losing his right to a rent-controlled (or -stabilized) NYC apartment because he didnât actually live there, but Iâm perfectly willing to admit that there are alternate scenarios. If one comes to light, Iâll be (mildly) curious to hear about it.
And now, I think, Iâve written enough about an issue that doesnât affect me personally and isnât really of all that much interest to me! I apologize for dominating the latter half of the discussion with my lengthy arguments.
In light of this information, I strongly suspect youâre right. Heâs using a rent controlled apartment as a get away, and felt entitled to it because it was his boyhood home. If heâs not actually using as a primary residence, then thatâs a completely different kettle of fish.
Sucks to not have your childhood home, but it was never really yours was it? File this eviction notice next to your Occulus VR kickstarter t-shirt as lessons in capitalism.
Of course, my wife recently visited our tenant who is living in the condo we once lived in, and commented on how she hardly recognizes it, and felt like a stranger in the same place we lived for years.
As I replied to you in a different thread, if this is true, then fuck him. This isnât what rent control is for.
Thank you, Hallmark card.
And so it begins.
The apartment from which Graeber was evicted is neither rent-controlled nor rent-stabilized; itâs a limited-equity cooperative in the Penn South development in the West 20s between 8th and 9th Avenues. This complex of apartment buildings was created as an urban renewal project in the 1960s with funding from the ILGWU, with special tax exempt status through an agreement with NYC under the Redevelopment Companies Law (NY Private Housing Finance Law article 5). Occupants were required to qualify on income at admission and to submit income certification affidavits and documentation annually. Non-primary residence in the apartment is a no-no and is grounds for eviction, and family members seeking to succeed to the ownership of co-op shares and the proprietary lease must prove they were on income affidavits and co-resided with the named cooperator/tenant during the two years prior to the cooperator/tenantâs death or permanent vacating of the apartment.
Families must plan ahead and make difficult choices, weighing the benefits of relocating for something uncertain (e.g., a tenure-track job in a distant city) against the security of an affordable rent in Manhattan.
For a family member hoping to succeed to one of these subsidized (through tax exemption) apartments, leaving an electronic or paper trail evidencing residence somewhere other than in the apartment is often a fatal mistake. Someone with visibility on the web, on social networks, or on any kind of database of public or semi-public records with a different address is particularly likely to find himself to be a target of efforts to evict non-primary residents from rent-regulated or subsidized housing.
The courts are not particularly sympathetic even in marginal cases where the subsidized landlord (here, a non-profit cooperative) can point to a years-long waiting list for such units.
I have had many, many family members of deceased/departed tenants of public/subsidized/regulated housing tell me that they thought of their parentâs apartment, where theyâd lived for years although not recently, as their family home and rightfully theirs to succeed to, and feel unjustly treated as a result of an eviction proceeding that followed their own personal loss. Unfortunately for them, I had to advise them that the law was not on their side. I am not assuming that this was DGâs situation but it is hardly unusual to hear reactions like âtheyâre throwing me out of my family homeâ when thereâs really no case to be made for succession.
Itâs unfortunate that his parents died, though it sounds plausible that thereâs a more prosaic explanation for the eviction than a Stasi inspired police pogrom. Iâll check back in a week when he finds that Theresa May has denied him entry to the UK for his subversive writings that are deemed to provide material assistance to terrorists.
Just to clarify, Occamâs Razor is not an assumption or a personal cognitive bias. It is (though it wasnât always) a mathematical result: the prior probability of a hypothesis in the absence of evidence declines exponentially as its complexity increases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occamâs_razor#Mathematical
Good point, I understand that it is a mathematical concept. The part that is the cognitive bias is when oneâs basis for decision making or judgments mirrors the assumptions expressed by that concept, assuming that the simpler solution or explanation is more likely to be the correct one, in the void of evidence indicating that is the actual case. Most cognitive bias can be explained via mathematical concepts, from game theory to pattern recognition to path of least resistance. In fact most of them can. Math is awesome that way.
Please explain to us all this in detail please. Not your friendâs case, Graeberâs.
Where was David Graeber living most of the time when all those decicions concerning the apartment were made ? You said he was lying, so you must know.
Please tell us precisely whose property he has stolen, in details. You said he was stealing, so you must know.
Or, maybe, just maybe, you know almost nothing about the case, and you are relying on your prejudices ?
And, do you consider it is absolutely impossible that Graeber is right here, and that the Police is involved ? If so why ?
And if you need more informations about the case, you could refer to his twitter feed, unless you have other sources of information about the case.
